As reported by Sarah (the Librarian in Black) Ask.com slashes jobs and changes focus. (Actually reported in a lot of places, but this was where I saw it first when coming in from teaching). As part of their reorganisation one of the redundancies has been Gary Price. Sarah is very disappointed by the news and I am as well. I have no personal ...

Pandia has covered the Ask story as have many others, and they're also considering possible alternatives for the coveted 4th spot. They mention Gigablast (though given the freshness test that I tried the other day I still have my doubts) but they are also looking at Exalead as a strong contender, particularly because it's a firm favourite with ...

There's an interesting article over at Silicon Alley Insider which is talking about the possibility that IAC is going to dump the Teoma search engine and just using the Google search engine with their own interface bolted on top. The same story is coming out of Valleywag and paidContent. At this stage it's all chinese whispers, in so far as ...

Ask has been doing some good stuff recently, particularly with their  Binoculars option. Previously you could just run your mouse over them and you'd get a thumbshot of the page. Now, as a result of a tie up with Compete we get more statistics, such as the number of visitors to a site. This can be really useful when it comes to deciding which ...

Ask.com hits back against AskEraser critics. This link goes to a Computer world story about how much or how little does Ask actually erase of individual search histories and patterns. It's all getting quite hysterical with claims and counter claims, so I'm not even going to start to summarise this one - you're on your own. For what it's worth, if ...

The Ask.com Blog: Give Me Some Skin: Ask Gets More Personal. Since the Ask relaunch last year you had the option of changing the skin of the page, and they've now got around to letting you change it to one of your own photographs which you can either upload or point to. Except it doesn't work with the UK version (though Ask generally drags the ...

From the IAC Search & Media: Press Releases. Ask.com today introduced free voice-activated capabilities to its Ask.com Mobile Directions service, the first of its kind from a search engine. Called "Click to Speak," the new feature lets people simply speak their location and desired destination to receive directions on their ...

Ask has announced and put into place the 'Ask Eraser' which they define as "the first product to give consumers privacy control over their online searches." When enabled by the user, AskEraser completely deletes all future search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers, including IP address, User ID, Session ID, ...

Useful stuff from Gary Price on  Ask UK Smart Answers Continue to Hit the Web: Weather, Climate, Football, Politics, and Train Schedules. Nice and straightforward; toddle along to Ask and do searches for labour party, tories, everton (or some inferior team if you prefer) or weather london. Another fun one to try is june climate ashford. Gary ...